Start.

Start.

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4 min read

Software development can be overwhelming, especially for total beginners. It's a highly dynamic industry with a lot of moving, evolving pieces.

The most helpful advice I was given when I started is to just start doing it.

There's really no other way to learn software development. Start.

The best time to start coding was yesterday, the second-best is today.

You can't read tutorials, books, watch videos on YouTube, without writing code and doing the work. I mean you could, but that's just a waste of time and energy.

Okay, this may sound like some new-age woo-woo, but it really is how everyone should start out.

Let's see some actionable steps.

Cut out the noise

One aspect of why beginners feel software development is hard is because there's so much information out there. The simplest coding problems have a million solutions.

I wrote about keeping up with web development where I detail this problem.

Cutting out 90% of the news and exercising coding every day is the key to a successful career in development.

Learn one thing at a time

I would argue that tutorials are actually a bad way to start out in software development because there are so many topics to choose from and not one tutorial covers it from end-to-end.

But books and courses usually do. So, my advice is to start with a single book on software development and then pick up another one on a different topic, but make sure you have a fairly good understanding of a topic after reading the book.

You can also enroll in an online course. I wrote more bout online course websites here.

If you're looking for good books have a look at this article here.

Get an "easy win"

One of the biggest reasons for burn-out is not the amount of work but not seeing the end result of the work you're doing.

Breaking down complex tasks is an art form in itself, but you should really invest energy into this skill.

No matter how simple is a task make sure you finish it and see the result, this way, you can close it mentally too. This is what I call an "easy win". Small incremental tasks finished, all working towards the bigger picture.

Rinse and repeat

What the title says. There are really no shortcuts to this, you need to exercise coding every day.

Once you think you're knowledgeable on a topic, pick a new one, or level up on the existing one.

The best way to do it, in my opinion, is to write about it. Start a blog and write about the topics you learn or start a TIL repo and log every new stuff you learned. Examples here and here.


Source to the tweet in the article cover image.


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